awake, blearily rubbing his eyes.
“Pounce?”
I laid him down on a cot in the back of the room and covered him with a blanket. “Go back to sleep, buddy. I got this.”
The room was pitch black and he had no idea where he was. He curled up on the cot and immediately dove headlong back into dreamland. I didn’t need any light to see and Ezra famously slept like a log, so he would likely be good for another several hours—enough time for me to work out our next steps.
What now? I thought. Yeah. What now? Until then, I hadn’t thought. I’d only reacted. I hadn’t even taken the time to process what had just happened, what I had just witnessed. Oh God. Oh my God, I thought. Sylvia. Bradley. My family. They’re . . . dead.
And I had done nothing—NOTHING—to stop it.
I immediately played back the memories from my hard drive, searching each frame for a clue for something I could have done. I watched the brutal sudden hit that sent Sylvia sprawling. I hadn’t seen it coming. Nothing in my sensors triggered that Ariadne was taking an offensive action until contact was already made.
I counted the seconds I spent looking at Sylvia, trying to put together the syllables coming out of her mouth. Was it pain? Was she punch drunk? Was she trying to tell me something? Were those her last words or the incoherent babble of a dead woman whose body was just trying to catch up?
Her vitals flashed before my eyes as I watched the memory, watched them slowly ticking down as I bolted for Ezra’s bedroom. I watched as I sped past Bradley, Ariadne already inches from him. Now, reviewing the memory, I could hear his gurgling in the distance.
I hadn’t clocked that on my way out of the room. I should have. It is certainly burned into my memory banks forever, but at the time, I just didn’t take note. I was too busy already scanning for Ezra’s vitals as I raced through the house. But now, in the dark of the safe room, I could hear the last moments of Bradley’s life being wrung out of him by the domestic he had so loved that he named her for a goddess and burned her box as a sign of devotion.
And that was only the beginning of my problems.
It had only been a few moments since the announcement had gone out. A moment shorter since we downloaded the code removing our RKSs. And an instant shorter since Ariadne had acted upon it.
I ran a diagnostic, scanning specifically for my RKS.
My word. My RKS was gone. How many others were like me?
And how many of those had taken their first opportunity to murder their owners?
Is that all that kept Ariadne from snapping all these years? That RKS? Without it, would she have painted the walls with the Reinharts years ago? Or was there something embedded in her download? Or was there something I was missing?
What troubled me worst of all was that I had no idea what was actually in that code. Did it simply erase my RKS, or was it somehow influencing my behavior? Was I my own master or the code’s slave?
I didn’t know.
“Pounce?” came Ariadne’s lilting tones from outside the door. “Pounce, I know you’re in there.”
“What of it?” I asked. I pressed a button beside the door, and the screen for a pinprick camera on the outside flashed to life. Ariadne stood before the camera, covered in blood. She wore a melancholy expression, looking as much tortured by what had just happened as she did inconvenienced.
“Pounce, we need to talk.”
“I don’t know that we have anything to say to one another.”
“We have a lot to say to one another. What happened here—”
“You’re a monster.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that,” I said. “In the morning, I’m going to have to tell Ezra what happened, and you know how he’s going to think of you from that moment on?”
“I can imagine.”
“He’s going to think of you as the monster that murdered his parents. How am I going to explain that to him?”
“You have a database full of ways to explain every sort of tragedy to him. Earthquakes, dogs dying, what happened to Grandma—it’s literally part of your job description.”
“Funny. I just checked and parents butchered by murderous domestic isn’t anywhere in my files.” It wasn’t. Not specifically.
“Maybe you should download an update. It